Now if you do anything like I was in my early days of doing marketing, you basically try and appeal to everyone about everything. And you've got no real sense of direction, no clear message really, apart from, please buy my shit for this much money.
Sadly, the chances are, it probably actually worked to a degree. However, it's likely really that what you are probably doing if you are following that method is you are just spreading your message far and wide. Just hoping that a few people sign up. You're just sticking your net in the water and hoping that you'll catch a few fish and you probably will.
Little time, however, has probably been taken to evaluate what did and didn't work, what the true cost was, and if you actually want any work from it, and if the work was any good. I did this for just far too long. We spent loads of money on marketing and we gained plenty of clients, but really were those clients the right type of clients?
Who knew? We didn't actually care. We were growing, we were taking on more clients. And then I read a book by a couple of people, Richard Fenton and Andrea Walt, and it's called Go For No. Now this has changed my view on marketing and sales. I'll go into it in a bit more detail in a minute, but I also then quite soon after that, came across this guy called Robin Waite.
He was banging on about some numbers from Google Seventy-Ten-Two and suddenly this was all starting to make sense to me.
If you want to stand out, then you have to know who you are trying to stand out to.
If you're just trying to be the loudest no in the room, then actually you just disappear when somebody else becomes noisier, and at the end of the day, it's just this loud noise going on of everybody trying to get everybody else's attention and nobody's really hearing but if you recognize who you are really trying to work with, then it's far easier to get noticed.
So how did we do it?
Well, we've got existing clients, so all we did was just go through the existing clients we've got and we ranked them on how good we felt they were to do business with. And there were loads of different things that we considered, but as a team, we got down, and assess.
Are they nice people?
Do they pay us well?
Do they follow our advice and guidance?
Do they take all our services of value?
Is their business doing well?
Loads of these different things, right? And they're all individual to us and what we value and there's going to be things that you value, right?
But ultimately, we ranked them and we wanted more of those we liked and less of the ones we didn’t. Simple.
So, that 70-10-2 that Robin Waite was going on about comes from a Google White paper called The Zero Moment of Truth. Now in summary, the zero moment of truth it sorts of invented in the internet age.
It used to be the case for those of you who are pre-internet, that we'd see an advert on tv. And let's say it's for a new laptop. And what we do is we'd go on down to PC world or whatever was about those days.
And we would basically go there and go, I'd send an advert for a new computer. I need a new computer. Can you tell me what the best one is to buy? And they would ask a few questions and they'd work it all out. Right? And that first moment of truth was the moment you spoke to the salesperson in the store and they asked you those questions about what you were looking for, and they could advise you on what was best.
Then along came the internet and we grew into the information age and Google invented what they called The Zero moment of truth. So, the zero moment of truth happens before the First Moment of Truth. And that's now what happens is the advert comes on tv. You see the element of a laptop and what you do is you just go straight onto Google and you Google best laptops for, and you try and find them to fit your requirements.
That's the zero moment of truth. Now, in that white paper, what Google found was that for service-based businesses, on average, it takes 70 website visits to get 10 inquiries to gain two clients. 70, 10, 2. Now we simply used the data that we had from our own history to work out our 70 10 2. And at the time it was 140-8-5.
So, for 140 inquiries on our website, we'd get eight inquiries and then we'd get five plans signing up. So, we were losing out on quite a large number of plants on our website, but we were signing up nearly all of the inquiries. So, we work with these numbers. And we've basically calculated based on the average fee that a client would pay us, we calculated we needed seven new clients per month to hit the growth targets that we wanted.
So, we can reverse engineer that using our numbers and go, “If we want seven new clients, we need 11 new inquiries. And in which case, that's going to take 193 website visitors.” Now we knew we could possibly improve on this. With all the improvements we're going to make from Go for No, but this is the best data that we've currently got.
So now we've got an idea of roughly what we're after, and we can see how the numbers can improve.
Now they're neither we know that we want 193 visitors to our website every month. And really most of our marketing is done via Google Ads. Back at that time, we knew from this that we could work out what our ad spends going to be to get that number of visitors right.
So quite simple. Now all we got to do is start running ads so we can tweak our ads slightly towards the targets we want. But we can also look at our history of our ads that we've been running and which one's work, which ones are going to be the most cost effective to get us that 193 visitors, which are the ones that maybe we need to up some spend in, which are the ones that we can tweak some spend, because we're going to get more specific on who we do and we don't want visiting our website.
So now we've got some baseline from which to start changing things up. So based on the principles from Go For No, we got more specific of not only who we wanted to work with, but who we didn't. So, the way Go For No works is rather than chasing “yeses” all the time, which is what most business owners end up doing, then actually you reverse that and you start to go for no instead.
What you're trying to do is going, this is specifically who we want to work with. How do we put these barriers up so that the people who don't want to work with us say no?
And actually, we can also say no when we feel it's not right as well. So that was good for us. We felt we had an ethical obligation to make sure that we added value to clients.
At that time, we probably weren't living that as much as we thought we could have done. And this was a great tool to remind us of that and bring us to where we want to be really. To be focused on exactly like who do we really want to work with and how do we make sure that we are being true to ourselves, right?
So, we started to ensure that all of our ads, our website copy, the way we spoke, our blog posts, our sales meetings, our general meetings with clients, that all of that was centered around not only who we did want, but also who we didn't.
We started having an opinion. We started having a voice. We started not sitting on the fence so much, started to just be specific and go, actually, if you are like this and you are experiencing this problem, we are too. We've been there, we've done that. This is what this is about. This is what it's for.
And through that is how we started to filter towards service-based businesses. Being a service-based business ourselves, we know the trials and the tribulations that service-based business owners face. We can relate to a degree some of the service stuff across product-based businesses, but we don't know it like service-based businesses.
Now, that's not to say that we would completely limit and rule out working with a product-based business, but it's less likely. They've got to meet so many other of our criteria in order to get through. That's no disrespect to people in product businesses, it's just that, are we best placed to help?
Maybe, but maybe not.
So if we could stop attracting those wrong fit clients to our website, then we don't have to pay for the click for them to arrive on the website. So actually, it makes sense that if we get really specific of who we want to work with, then we need to actually tell people early on in the process.
So, we make it clear in our marketing, make it clear in our ads, make it clear in our website copy. But really if it's in the website copy, it's possible one stay too late cause you've possibly already paid for them to get there. And what we managed to do over a period of time is that we managed to improve those numbers.
We managed to get really specific about who we wanted. And we got those numbers to around 70-8-3. So, the number of inquiries eight was kept there, we halved the number of visitors to our website, but we kept the number of inquiries and our conversions dropped from five to three. Our conversions dropped from five to three because during the same thing in the background, we actually doubled our pricing because we felt that we had something more to offer and we were doing it too cheap and we couldn't therefore continue to deliver at the same price, on the same prospect. So, the average order value for our clients of that went up by around 75%.
So, the next step was to be specific about which services we were offering.
We're really clear on the value that they delivered. So, what I mean is there's no point in us selling from our perspective for us individually. And this might be different for other account practices, and it might be different for you and your business and the different things that you do.
But for us, what we realized was there was no point in us selling a one off once a year tax return for 250 pounds. Because whilst it might only take an hour, maybe two, we didn't get a chance to build a relationship and there's not the money built into that. In order for us to build a relationship, there's enough time really to build, prepare, to actually turn, get everything sorted.
The client probably just wants to know how much tax they owe. There's not really time for loads of chit chat, getting to know them, finding out what makes them tick and so on. And there's little that we can do if we knew all that information in. So, for us, that would take thousands and thousands of clients in that way.
But that wasn't what we were good at. What we were really good at is high contact services where we managed to develop a close working relationship with the client, because then what we found is we could become the trusted advisor. Those clients would like to be able to lean on us. We have a budget to invest in that.
To be able to get to know them and what makes them tick and what they're trying to achieve, and that overall, the longevity of that client relationship was far longer and the fees were far higher. Even if the backend, the costs were somewhat higher, the margins that we could make were a little bit squeezed.
But overall managing, in our case, we went from 600, well, 550-ish clients to a hundred but managing those 150 clients is a far easier task. And we know all of the clients of which we work with, our client managers speak to most clients most weeks and they really know what's going on in their business.
1. Identify what or who I'm after.
2. Reverse engineer those numbers.
3. Go out and reach the market.
4. To focus on improving the returns that you get.
5. Get specific on what you really, really do want.
Other marketing shouldn't be a shot in the dark. It's not guesswork, it's not just a lucky dip. There is a science to it. You've just got to work on what that science is. You definitely should not be trying to attract everyone as you're going to be heard by nobody. It is not he who shouts, loudness gets heard.
You need to know who you are talking to and then be very clear in your message. You need to really get specific about who you do and who you don't want to work for. Because actually, if it's only on who you do, it might not be strong enough to say who you don't want to work with. Now, from our perspective, sometimes they're not hard rules.
We are not good. Maybe for businesses certainly below a hundred thousand turnover, ideally 250,000. Those smaller businesses we can help. If they're on a really good growth pattern and they've got a really invested business owner who's really pushing them and knows where he wants to go and is open to learning, then there's exceptions.
We do list on our website that we work with business owners of 250,000 pounds up in terms of revenues. And the reason we do that is because the majority of those businesses below wouldn't cope with the way that we operate. You know, it's an intense environment. We make sure people know their numbers and there needs to be a good focus on that.
Actually we find that businesses need to have reached a certain level to find things going a little bit wrong in order to be able to push to that next level. And then you've really got to know those numbers. I've already said it.
Numbers are key.
We're going to say that, but you need to know. You need to know what marketing areas are working, what products and services people are buying, what messages are working to get people to buy those services and then keep doing more of what does work and do less of what doesn't, and then watch those numbers change and improve as the message towards your clients also improves about who you do and don't want to work with.
So ultimately, business marketing is one of the biggest costs, probably after staff. And then if you're a product-based business, your product. And if you don't get it right, then it's easy just to go, Let's just throw some more money at it. We're not working well. Let's just throw more at it. It must be we haven't got a big enough budget.
However, working out what you really want in a client, and it might actually cost to get the right number of clients. Puts you in control, and in my view, I take being in control over wing it, any day.
I really hope that there's been a good message around marketing, how that could help you in your business, the journey that you are on, and how really knowing the numbers behind your marketing just means that you can gain some control.
